Tuesday, January 27, 2009

One thing I like

I use a laptop, but I use my laptop at my desk for most (if not all) of my work day. If a laptop battery stays plugged in all the time, never letting the battery discharge, the battery doesn't hold much of a charge after about a year.

So when I'm at work, I sometimes like to let the laptop run on battery power, and will unplug the laptop from the wall.

Occasionally, I'd forget I'd done this, and would come back from a meeting to find my Linux laptop had automatically shut down when the battery reached a critical level. The default in Linux (Fedora) was to shut down. Plugged in the laptop, booted up, and Firefox restored all previous tabs and sessions, and OpenOffice automatically recovered any open documents.

This happened again the other day with my Windows laptop. I came back from a meeting, and realized my laptop was off. Except it wasn't - it was in standby mode. Plugged in the laptop, hit the power - and the laptop woke up. No browser sessions to restart, no Office documents to worry about.

So I guess that's one thing where the default on Windows makes more sense than the default on Linux. I'll give it that.

4 comments:

Yeah, Linux hibernation is dodgy because ACPI is completely fouled up. It's pretty reliable if you have an all-Intel chipset. A smart distro like Ubuntu helps. Matthew Garrett is a kernel developer specialising in this area and rants at length about it on his journal: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/ . (Warning: frequent salty language.)

Whoa. I really liked your blog up until I saw this post. As a true Linux user, there isn't ANYTHING good about any Microsoft product. It's all or nothing. What's next? You start liking when a program crashes you get an error message displayed instead of just closing itself in Linux, forcing you to run the program again from bash just to see the error message when Rhythmbox crashes because while your running the most advanced GUI in the world it still has it's roots in a Text Based Interface? You just lost a big chunk of my respect. I don't think I'll be coming back to this blog.

About me

I've been a Linux user since 1993, and since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. But, I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows and Linux has been shocking, to say the least. Since I find it interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years.